


Lady of Spring

by elanorjoy



Category: A Court of Thorns and Roses Series - Sarah J. Maas
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-11-20
Updated: 2016-11-19
Packaged: 2018-08-31 23:50:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 7,774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8598754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elanorjoy/pseuds/elanorjoy
Summary: What if Ianthe hadn't included red flowers in the wedding?





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> There was a time when this was going to be a much longer story, but I don't do canon rewrites very well, so it never got off the ground. I'm mostly putting it on here because I don't want it's different components just floating around Tumblr with no rhyme or reason.

 

> * * *
> 
>  

_I just watched him, unyielding and cold and dark. The creature I might one day have become if I had stayed at the Spring Court, if I had remained broken for decades, centuries … until I learned to quietly direct those shards of pain outward, learned to savor the pain of others._

* * *

 

What if Ianthe didn’t include the red flowers in the wedding?

Feyre still panics as she’s walking down the aisle, but she doesn’t call for help in her mind. Rhysand doesn’t crash the wedding to save her and Feyre weeps through her wedding vows. She tells herself it’s from happiness.

Tamlin still protects her and locks her away and she still wastes away to almost nothing and Tamlin still slowly stops visiting her bedroom. She still gives the water wraith her jewelry during the tithe, because she still remembers how it felt to be hungry, but it’s the last time she defies Tamlin publicly for a long, long time. On that awful day that Tamlin left for the coast, he didn’t feel the need to put a ward on the manor house because Feyre didn’t get out bed.

Tamlin is still vigilant about Feyre’s safety and finding a way to break the bond. It’s been a year since they escaped from Under the Mountain and Rhsyand hasn’t called in the bargain yet, but Tamlin doesn’t trust him. He won’t rest until Feyre is free. Nevermind the fact that she is so much thinner than she was when she first came to the Spring Court. Nevermind that she barely sleeps and can hardly stand to leave her bedroom. Nevermind that she still flinches away from Lucian’s red hair and hasn’t painted in a year and barely even speaks to him. Tamlin is convinced that once she’s free from Rhysand’s influence, things will get better.

In the meantime, Feyre’s powers grow more and more unmanageable and they never get an outlet. After she’s nearly burned down the manor house on three separate occasions, iced over Tamlin’s mother’s rose garden twice and left innumerable gouges in doors and tables and chairs from the unexpected appearance of claws, she figures out that these displays of power are directly tied to her emotions. Frost when she’s angry and fire when she’s afraid and one time a darkness so bleak and miserable after a nightmare that she doesn’t sleep for a week to stave it off. After that, she learns to put up a wall between herself and the rest of the world. She trains herself out of feeling emotions. She doesn’t cry, doesn’t rage, doesn’t feel anything.

It helps for a little while.

But she still has that damned tattoo on her arm and Tamlin is still hellbent on saving her from it. It takes Ianthe longer to wear him down, but eventually he still goes to Hybern, still makes a deal. The bargain is broken and it’s the worst pain Feyre has felt in a long time and it wakes something up inside her.

She didn’t ask for that bond to be broken. Is she relieved? Perhaps a little, but Rhsyand has left her alone for so long. She thinks it was a means to an end and that’s all. She doesn’t tell Tamlin that she can still feel something through that broken bond. She has spent so long teaching herself not to feel anything that she clings to the glimmers of emotion that she can still feel through it. Those glimmers are all she can feel these days, all she allows herself to feel. She doesn’t let herself imagine that it could be Rhysand. It isn’t possible, the King of Hybern swore it to her.

But her heart stirs just a little when she hears rumors that the High Lord of the Night Court stole the Fae half of the Book of Breathings from the Summer Court. She finds herself concerned for the first time in years when Tamlin starts to amass his troops and allies to go to war to retrieve that half of the book for the King of Hybern.

In addition to using the Spring Court to throw Prythian into a civil war, Hybern still wants to use Tamlin’s borders as a means to enter the human realm. It was part of the bargain Tamlin made with him and, this time, Feyre didn’t know what it meant. It turns out that Hybern has been courting the mortal queens, using Jurian to gain their trust and they have offered him their half of the Book in exchange for immortality. Their bargain still comes at a cost.

Hybern calls it a gift to the Lady of the Spring Court when he arrives with his armies and her immortal sisters in tow.

Something inside Feyre breaks when she sees Elain’s pointed ears and Nesta’s perfectly symmetrical features. This time, when Feyre loses control over her emotions and her powers, she plunges half of the Spring Court into darkness and fire before she falls unconscious. The resulting chaos lasts for a week while she hovers on the brink of death. The Spring Court is plagued with earthquakes, ice storms, wildfires, floods, and a very short tornado before they manage to revive her.

Nothing is the same once they do.

Feyre realizes what she’s done, what her passivity has caused, what destruction she has stood by and allowed to be unleashed on the world. She’s devastated and pissed as hell and horrified and she forces herself to feel it all. And when she’s through and the storm of emotion and pain dwindles into mist, she fights.

Not overtly, of course. Feyre quickly realizes that Hybern, more than anyone else, understands how very powerful she is. She tries to hide it behind the mask from before and it mostly works. It would work better if Nesta would speak to her or if Elain would stop crying. Just like in her human life, her sisters become her driving force to survive and overcome. Feyre determines that she will not allow Hybern to use her sisters against her, won’t give him the opportunity.

So, she plays the docile and emotionless Lady of Spring until Hybern leaves with his armies to fight the Night Court and then she trains. That week-long display of uncontrolled power is enough to convince Tamlin that she needs to learn, and so he takes it on himself to train her as much as he can. When he doesn’t know how to help her with an aspect of her power, he finds someone who does. He rationalizes it by telling himself that he is protecting her from herself. He doesn’t teach her how to defend herself physically though. It helps him sleep at night to think that he can still protect her in at least one way.

Feyre doesn’t sleep at night. She makes herself eat again. Her nightmares stopped forcing her to puke her guts up ages ago, but she never really gained back the weight she lost then because she never really got back her appetite. But now she eats, a little more each day so as not to rouse too much suspicion. Slowly, so slowly, she begins to fill out again. She sees how Tamlin trains his warriors and she practices those movements when she’s alone in her bedroom. Push-ups, crunches, wind sprints, over and over again until she can barely feel her limbs and the physical ache in her muscles matches the ache in her heart. Soon, she feels stronger than she ever has.

While she’s training, she learns to think like Lucian. There are no _daemati_ available to train her, so she just lets herself fall into his mind whenever she can and sees what it takes to become cunning and sly and silver tongued. She learns when to keep her mouth shut and when to speak. She discovers how he has built walls around his heart and still manages to function at the same time. She takes notes.

It’s how she learns that Elain is his mate.

It takes her a long time. He purposefully ignores that piece of himself, for Elain’s sake and it takes months for her and Lucian and Elain to be in the same room together. That’s when Feyre feels it. She can drop into Lucian’s mind easily by then and she does it to distract herself from the fact that Elain still can’t quite look her in the eye, even though she and Nesta have been in the Spring Court for months. In Lucian’s mind, Feyre can almost see that glimmering thing connecting the two of them and it feels so similar to that thing that’s been so quiet inside her heart for so long that her shock throws her out of Lucian’s head.

Her suspicions start to form then. She thinks back to every moment she spent with Rhys, forces herself to relive Under the Mountain, tries to recall every look, every word he spoke, every time she thought she felt something through that glimmering thing that was the bargain and every phantom of a feeling she’s felt through it since. She does some more research, mostly through Alis and a little through Lucian and learns everything she can about the mating bond and the traditions surrounding it.

And then Feyre bides her time. She knows that she is more powerful than Tamlin, possibly more powerful than Hybern (if his powers weren’t fueled by the damned Cauldron). She starts doesn’t have a name for it, but she starts honing her skills as a _daemati_. Soon she can control most of the servants, walk through their memories and wipe their thoughts clean. It’s a power that Tamlin doesn’t know she possesses, and she doesn’t let on. Instead, she plans dinner parties and hunts and festivals for his generals and then sits quietly at Tamlin’s side while he entertains their guests and she waltzes through their minds.

She learns about the Night Court and the civil war. She discovers that Hybern’s armies will move on the human realm sooner than Tamlin ever could have imagined. She learns their strategies, their weaknesses, their hiding places and the secrets to their wards.

And when Tamlin’s army captures the commander of the Night Court’s armies, some general with wings and an obnoxious attitude named Cassian, Hybern suggests that they trade his life for the half of the Book the Night Court stole from Summer. And he suggests that Tamlin bring Feyre along for the trade. It’s part of Tamlin’s bargain, after all, that Feyre will help Hybern with the Book and Tamlin can’t say no. Hybern promises that this will end the war. All he has ever wanted from the Night Court was the Book of Breathings. Once he has it, he can go on to unite the fairy and human realms. It will bring peace to Prythian.

It’s a load of bullshit. Feyre knows it. Tamlin knows it. The Night Court commander, broken and bloody as he is, knows it and starts laughing when he hears it, earning himself another broken rib. Feyre doesn’t have to break into Hybern’s mind to know it’s a lie, but she can’t act, not yet. When words comes from the High Lord of the Night Court that he will accept the terms, she lays a calming hand on Tamlin’s arm and sweetly asks if her sisters can come too.

Which is how they all end up on a tiny island off Prythian’s coast. Technically, it’s on the border of the Dawn and the Winter Courts, but it’s so small that it hardly matters. Hybern winnows Jurian and Cassian, while Tamlin makes two trips, one to take Feyre and Nesta (who has at least stopped spitting with rage every time she sees Hybern) and another to bring Lucian and Elain. While Tamlin is gone, Feyre feels out Hybern’s magic, finds its weak spots and lays out magical traps of her own. Feyre already has the now-immortal queens’ half of the Book. Hybern gave it to her before they left, told her that she had to be the one who put them together as soon they obtained the other half.

The second Rhys winnows in with Mor and Azriel, Feyre knows he’s her mate. He is still the most beautiful male she’s ever seen and when she meets his violet blue eyes, she feels the magic in the bond roar back to life. He wasn’t expecting her to be there and her presence shocks him so much that he almost falters back a step when he sees her. Almost, but not quite. She holds his gaze for a long moment, long enough for the King to notice, but then Cassian groans and Rhysand’s attention falls solely onto his friend and the King who has him in chains.

They exchange goes smoothly. Hybern asks Feyre to take Cassian and fetch the Book from Rhys and Tamlin's protests go unheard. It is easy for Feyre to grab hold of her sister’s minds and force them to walk alongside her as she leads Cassian across the sand to Rhysand. Neither one of them have received any kind of training and they can’t protect themselves from her control, can't even open their mouths to scream. They are a vision, three beautiful females, dressed in the gauze and chiffon the Spring Court, walking a battered and bloody soldier across the beach. Feyre sees it in her mind’s eye and has the desire to paint something for the first time since she became immortal.

And once they have met Rhysand in the middle of the tiny island, instead of taking the half of the Book that Rhysand is holding out to her, Feyre forces her sisters to go towards the golden haired female while Feyre turns around to face the males she just left.

The males who don’t know that the second she saw Rhysand, she banged on his mental shields until he let her inside. The males who don’t know that she promised to give him Cassian and the other half of the Book if he helped her and her sisters escape. The males who don’t know that Rhysand agreed without hesitation and used his own power to inform his people of the plan.

The last thing she says to Tamlin is, “He’s my mate.”

And then Rhysand puts a hand on her shoulder and she disappears into wind and ash and starlight with the rest of the Night Court.


	2. At the Moonstone Palace

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Rhysand takes Feyre and her sisters to the Night Court.

Rhysand still takes Feyre to the moonstone palace first, Mor right behind him with her sisters. It’s one of the safer locations left in the Night Court. Velaris is still whole and safe because he was never able to obtain an audience with the mortal queens, so he never had to tell them about its existence and it was never attacked. But it’s not as if he can take the Lady of the Spring Court to city that the world doesn’t know exists. Besides, no one, not even Hybern, would dream of attacking the palace atop the Hewn City. Not if they wanted to live.

It is still the most beautiful place Feyre has ever seen and he watches her take in all in with wide eyes.

He wishes he could have taken her directly to Velaris. He wishes that could be certain that he doesn’t need to protect his true Court from her. He wishes that she weren’t the Lady of Spring. He wishes that taking her from Tamlin, mate or not, wasn’t an act of war that will inevitably make things so much worse than they already are. He wishes that now that she knows they are mates, he could take her some place quiet and they could talk through all of it. He wishes that he could kiss her and hold her and breathe in her scent because he has never felt this whole before in his life. He wishes that, mate or not, she wasn’t looking at him like he is a monster, even as he makes himself let go of her hand and draw away from her.

But he has never really gotten anything he has ever wished.

At least, he hasn’t until now. Because in spite of the delivery and the timing and the uncertainty surrounding her, he and his mate are in the same room again. She’s looking at him like she thinks there’s a chance he’ll throw her in a prison at any moment, but she’s looking at him. It is more than he has dared to hope, more than he thought would be possible for the rest of his immortal life. It is enough for now.

His mind is spinning and he feels unbalanced. Or maybe he feels balanced for the first time in his life because his mate is with him and he doesn’t understand how to function when his heart isn’t in pieces. The words she spoke to Tamlin are still ringing in his head, a chorus on repeat: He’s my mate. He’s my mate. He’s my mate.

Still standing before him, Feyre doesn’t tremble with fear as she might have once. She suspects that Rhysand will lock her away, but she has been locked away before and there is nothing in this world that is as terrifying as her own nightmares. So, she takes a deep breath (the first deep breath she’s been able to take in years), stands tall before the High Lord who is her mate and says, “Thank you.”

Behind her, Nesta tears away from the blonde female, pulling Elain with her and growls. Not at Rhysand, but at Feyre, “What have you done?”

“Tamlin is a fool and Hybern was going to use the two of you to manipulate me into destroying the world,” Feyre says, her eyes never leaving Rhysand’s face, even as Elain begins to sob behind her. “I did what needed to be done.”

They hold each other’s gaze for a long, quiet moment before Rhysand finally says, “Welcome to the Night Court.”

As he stares at her, it occurs to him that he doesn’t have time for this. He needs to get Cassian to a healer, needs to give both pieces of the book to Amren, needs to have Azriel send new spies across Prythian to find out how and if the news of Feyre’s betrayal is spreading to the other Courts, needs to talk to Mor and figure out a safe place to keep Feyre’s sisters in a land that’s slowly becoming more and more unsafe for anyone. And there are a thousand other things he needs to do after that, but all he can do is stare at Feyre.

She is...more than he remembered. Beautiful, yes, she is so much more beautiful as she stands in front of him that she was in his memories. And there is a wild, almost violent strength to her now that he doesn’t remember being there before. Her eyes aren’t the grey of storm clouds over the ocean like he thought, but the blue-gray of steel, sharp and deadly as an Illyrian blade. She holds herself differently too, head high, spine straight, shoulders back, a quiet confidence that’s belied only by the way her body is angled away from everyone else in the room, like she’s prepared to flee at any given moment. Her face is what gives him pause. He searches the face he’s dreamed about every night for years for a sign of that human heart that he once told her to cherish. He doesn’t see it and it breaks something inside him as he realizes that the girl he loved Under the Mountain is gone.

Feyre doesn’t notice that he is silently grieving for her. She’s too busy trying figure out how to keep him from tossing her sisters into the Court of Nightmares and throwing away the key. She’s heard plenty of rumors about the Night Court by now, the nicest of which are still disturbing and the nastiest of which are horrifying. And besides, Rhysand has been quietly staring at her for a long time and that can’t possibly be a good thing. She’s so certain that she’s doomed them all that she blurts out that she can slip into people’s minds.

He blinks, once, twice, and cocks his head, as if he didn’t understand her correctly. But he must have, he’s the only other person she knows who can do the same thing. Her voice is low and her words are quick as she explains that she has spent months gathering Hybern’s plans and loitering in his general’s minds. She tells him that she will help him win the war if he keeps her sisters safe.

Feyre extends her hands to him, palm up, a silent invitation for him to explore her memories so that he can see that she’s telling the truth.

She has mental shields up. Tamlin might not have known that she was daemati, but he knew that daemati were out there and a threat, so he taught her what he had been taught as a boy and then as a soldier. Her shields aren’t perfect, she’s never had to practice keeping someone out of her head, but they are effective and Rhys is surprised that they are there at all as he carefully knocks against the walls of adamant. The last time he walked in her head was during the second challenge Under the Mountain and he’s glad she has learned to protect herself since then.

Feyre doesn’t let him in. Rhys feels a bolt of something...perhaps it’s irritation, or maybe panic, he’s not sure, but something not good shoots down the bond and he jumps back into his own body immediately. But that feeling is still there and it takes him a minute to realize that it’s not directed at him. He doesn’t push her, just slips back into the antechamber of her mind and waits patiently while all manner of feelings, none of them good either, course through the bond at him.

Finally, without looking at him, she says, “I have spent my immortal life building walls to keep people out, for their protection and mine.” He starts to pull away from her, immediately ready to tell her it’s alright, that she’s given him the Book of Breathings and that’s far more than he ever expected, but she grips his hand harder and says, “I want to let you in. Help me.”

Rhys’ voice is soft when he tells her to imagine a door opening in that wall of adamant, or, if she can’t manage that, just a sliver will do. Once he’s in, he’ll be able to find what he needs. She doesn’t look up at him with vulnerability, as she might have done in the past, but with unyielding determination and he can feel her warring with herself as she struggles to allow him in. He waits, her fingers still wrapped around his, while Mor and her sisters watch in silence.

When she finally lets him in, Feyre doesn’t open a door so much as blast a hole in those shields, like she’s been swinging a hammer at them from inside. She cries out with the effort and Rhys can feel how the force of it almost knocks her off her feet. And it’s an ongoing battle within her. She’s maintaining that hole in her shields, but only just. She has spent so long training herself to hide behind them that she’s still subconsciously trying to keep him out.

Rhys can’t help but laugh, a single soft chuckle that raises the hair on her arms.

“Brutal, but effective,” he says in an effort to disarm her, his posture loose and his eyes warm.

Neither of them sees how Mor’s mouth falls open at the sound of her cousin’s laughter. She hasn’t heard her cousin laugh in over a century. The last time she had seen him laugh was the night before he left to go to that goddamned banquet in Amarantha’s honor. It had been over something biting and sarcastic Amren had muttered to Cassian during dinner, if she remembers correctly. But she hasn’t heard him laugh, has barely even seen him smile, since he returned from Under the Mountain. She wasn’t sure if she would ever see him laugh again, wasn’t sure if the scars ran too deep to ever truly heal. Mor understands now that he couldn’t have laughed while he was separated from Feyre, couldn’t have felt joy while she was with another male, in another Court.

While Mor tries to hide her surprise, Rhys brushes against Feyre’s mind with a tendril of star-flecked darkness, runs careful hands along the bond, repeats relax, relax, relax, over and over like a prayer. She doesn’t. She tenses against that touch and he can feel her forcing herself to breathe. He waits, barely breathing himself, tamping down on his own power in an effort to make himself smaller, less threatening. Eventually, the sharp edges around the hole soften and he hears her voice in his mind and it’s more fragile than anything he’s heard her say out loud so far.

_Come in._

He slips through that shattered bit of her shields and carefully, so carefully, begins to shift through her memories. He lets her feel his presence there, making sure she knows every memory he touches.

_Say the word and I’ll stop_ , he tells her, remembering a time when he held her mind in his hands while she trembled with fear and lied to his face anyway.

But Feyre doesn’t stop him and she doesn’t tremble. She tries to pull useful memories up for him, displaying snippets of battle plans and training camps and strategy boards that she’s stolen from the minds of generals and commanders and warlords. It only takes him a few minutes to determine that she’s not a double agent, that she’s really there to do whatever she can to save the human realm, that she has had enough of Tamlin and his single-minded drive to protect her at the cost of the world. He winds himself back into his body carefully, so as not to jar her and, this time, when he releases her hand, she lets him go.

“If you do this, there is no going back,” he says. “If you change your mind, you can go back to the Spring Court, but you can never speak of what happened while you were here. Any of you.”

“You have my word,” Feyre says and, for the first time since arriving, she looks at her sisters. Elain is still cowering behind Nesta while Nesta watches the whole exchange with wary eyes. Rhys swears that a muscle in Feyre’s cheek twitches before she says, “I’ll wipe their minds clean myself.”

Feyre’s word is good enough for him. He nods in agreement and ignores how Nesta has begun sputtering in indignation at Feyre’s promise. Mor’s mouth drops open in shock again when he finally turns to her and says, “Let’s go home.”


	3. Bits and Pieces

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is a bunch of threads of the longer AU that never made it. If you don't like incomplete thoughts or random scenes with no connections, transitions, or endings, you might want to skip this.

There is no time for Cassian to train Feyre to defend herself or for Rhysand to help her explore her powers. There is a war going on after all and they both are on the battlefield more often than not. Instead, Amren and Mor, who run the Night Court and keep Velaris safe in Rhys’ absence, train her (and Elain and, eventually, Nesta).

Amren is not particularly impressed with the jagged and sharp former Lady of the Spring Court, and she is a relentless task master. After all, her Court is at war and her friends are on the battlefield nearly every day and she has much better things to do, like translate that goddamn Book so they can win the goddamn war, and she hasn’t had to train anybody in centuries and her patience is running thing. It doesn’t matter to her that Feyre brought them the other half of the Book and chose her mate over her Court. This girl, who is still a child in so many ways, caused her friend and High Lord years of pain, even if it was inadvertent, so Amren is a little prejudiced towards her in the beginning.

But that prejudice transforms into something like tolerance soon enough. Feyre’s understanding of her powers is largely self-taught. Tamlin did his best to get her good teachers, but the Spring Court simply did not have anyone as old or wise as Amren and many of Feyre’s methods are clumsy at best and completely ridiculous at worst. The ways that Feyre has supplemented what she’s been taught are really quite creative and Amren finds them so fascinating that she puts up with the rest.

But just because Feyre’s methods are fascinating doesn’t mean that they’re right. Amren spends a lot of time training the bad habits Feyre picked up from the Spring Court’s teachers out of her. Amren insists that Feyre has good instincts, she just needs to refine them. Some days Feyre feels more sure of this than others. She knows her magic by now and she knows when it feels right and when it feels wrong. She drives herself into exhaustion trying to merge Amren’s methods with what feels right for her magic.

Amren doesn’t figure out what Feyre’s trying to do until Feyre collapses with the effort of maintaining what should have been a simple summoning spell and nearly burns the house down instead. And Amren is pissed. After all, no one has questioned her methods in a millennia, but there also hasn’t been anything new in a millennia. So Amren untangles the mess that Feyre’s made and figures out ways to modify her teaching to fit with Feyre’s instincts. Once she does that, Feyre progresses quickly.

Mor is…Mor. She is the only one who instantly accepts Feyre and treats her like family. Mor has lived through plenty of nightmares, has seen what happens to people who aren’t allowed to feel and dream. she knows what it takes to recover, and she makes it her mission to help Feyre do that, even if Feyre doesn’t want it at first.

Mor is in charge of physical training. She was trained by Rhys and can hold her own against Azriel and even Cassian. She has been a warrior on the battlefield and fought alongside enough humans during the war that she knows how to interact with these girls who used to be human. The three of them have been living amongst the Fae for long enough that they don’t need her to be anything but herself for them, but she is a little bit easier to handle, especially for Elain.  

Elain is cowed by both of them at first, but by the end of day one, she practically worships the ground Mor walks on. Nesta does not. She spent the first three days arguing with anyone who came near her. Only after Elain shows her how Amren taught her how to use her power to bring a plant back to life does Nesta finally consent to getting trained.

They are a holy terror as they learn how to control their magic. Amren quickly decides that the only place in Velaris that’s safe for them to practice is the House of Wind. She resents having to make this decision, because it means that she will be stuck at the House until someone can fly her down. But it’s either that or have one of them accidentally flood the Palace of Hoof and Leaf (Feyre) or nearly burn down the townhouse (Elain) or ice over an entire city block (Nesta) and Amren doesn’t have the time to clean up their messes again, so she puts up with it.

* * *

After about a month, Rhysand shows up and asks if Feyre has some time to talk. It’s a surprising request. He hasn’t touched her since they left the Prison, but when he winnows her away to a mountain lake ringed with pine trees, he doesn’t let go of her hand at first. And at first she doesn’t notice because where he’s brought her is so beautiful and so close to the sky that Feyre thinks she might be able to touch the stars. And then she looks at him and realizes the lake and the sky don’t even begin to compare to the beauty that is her mate. He smiles, just a little, as if he read that thought and she just looks at him. And then he blurts out, “So, you’re my mate.”

“Yes,” she says, her voice a whisper on the breeze as she looks out over the lake. “I am.” And then, before he can say anything else. “It doesn’t have to change anything.”

It’s his turn to stare, because it changes everything. He thought he would have to live the rest of his life knowing she was his mate and unable to have her. He felt the bargain between them break and had thought she was happy and healthy and didn’t want anything to do with him. She’s left her husband, the male she literally died for, to be here. It is more than he ever dreamed was possible, more than he had ever dared to hope for.

But he doesn’t say any of those things. Instead, he asks, “How did you know?”

She doesn’t look back at him as she explains the story. She starts back when Hybern broke the bargain and Rhys cringes at the memory of falling the ground in agony as the magic was undone. She tells him about how she still felt glimmers of it, how they were the only thing she let herself feel for years and years. He has to fight back tears when she says, “It helped me come back to life.”

Feyre doesn’t know, of course, that when Hybern broke the bond he had actually thought that she died. She doesn’t know that he fell to his knees in the middle of Velaris and scared the living shit out of his friends when he roared in pain and terror and heartbreak so loudly that the cobblestones crumbled beneath him. She doesn’t know how he was sick with fear, how he flashed back to watching her die Under the Mountain, how he wept with relief when he realized that she wasn’t gone after all. She doesn’t know that he thought she wanted it broken and had done his best to let her live her life, had tamped down on his emotions and done his absolute best not to let any of them travel down the bond. The thought that what had managed to trickle through in spite of his best efforts had been what had helped her after she’d faded so much that he’d barely been able to feel her.

She doesn’t see his reaction to her words and if she feels any of it coming from him through the bond, she doesn’t react as she continues her story. Rhysand huffs a laugh through his tear-clogged throat when she tells him that she first understood the mating bond because she was in Lucian’s head. And then he realizes that if she sensed the mating bond in Lucian, that means Lucian has a mate. When she tells him it’s Elain, he’s more than a little upset that he’s only just now learning that he’s not only got Tamlin’s wife, but Lucian’s mate under his protection. He sarcastically asks if Nesta has mated with anyone and Feyre surprises him again when she says, “No, but I think she’s in love with the commander of your armies.”

She tells him how she learned everything she could about the mating bond, about how when she learned about Hybern’s plans for Cassian, she had begun to plan. She had always known that allying with Hybern was wrong, had always known she had to do something to attempt to save the human realm from his armies. As soon as she had found out that she was attending the exchange, she had decided that even if he wasn’t her mate, she would do whatever it took to get him to take her back with him.

“Even though you thought I was a monster?” he asks. “You didn’t know anything about me.”

“You have been fighting to save the world, not just your Court,” she says with a shrug. “And you never called in the bargain. You couldn’t have been all bad.”  

“And what now?” Rhysand doesn’t know the woman standing before him. He loved the girl who died Under the Mountain, and he is certain that he already loves the woman that girl became. If she asked him to, he would marry her and make her his queen before dawn, but he doesn’t know what she wants and he refuses to push her into anything.

“Right now, stopping Hybern is my priority. The rest can wait.”

There is a part of him that crumples at the words. It’s smart and it makes sense and he knows it. But, just once, he wishes that things could be different, that he could have the time and space to fall in love with her properly, to give her the chance to fall in love with him. He should be happy that his mate is safe and that he has the ability to see her face every day, but he wants so much more for her, for them.

And maybe she senses some of that through the bond because she asks, “How long have you known?”

He tells a different story than he might have in another time and place, but the details are all the same. He tells her about the dreams and Calenmai and that he’s known for sure since Amarantha broke her neck. The tears still flow and they don’t stop as he explains why he left without her, why he never called the bargain in, why he was willing to let her be with Tamlin if it meant that she was happy. By the time he’s through, she’s looking at him again and her eyes are bright.

“I am broken,” she whispers. “I spent years healing wrong and I don’t know if it’s too late to fix what I have become.” She lifts her hands and her fingers are soft as feathers against his skin as she wipes away his tears. Her hand remains on his cheek after she’s dried them. “But I want to be with you. I don’t know what that means yet, but I want to be here with you and I will not allow that to be taken away.”

And now he’s crumpling for an entirely different reason and he feels like his knees might collapse beneath the weight of everything he’s feeling. He wants to kiss her and hold her and swear that he’ll never let her be taken away from him, that he will tear the world apart if it means he can keep her with him, but he’s afraid it would be too much, too soon. So he takes her hands from his cheeks and presses a fervent kiss onto her knuckles.

* * *

“Tamlin and I…We haven’t…We have only been…together on Calenmai. It’s been like that for years now.”

Something inside Rhys’ chest unknots itself when she says those words. 

* * *

There’s no time for her to meet his Inner Circle, or for her to decide whether or not she wants to work with them.

He takes her to the Bone Carver first, because, even though the information that Feyre has given him is good, he needs to know how the now immortal queens fit into Hybern’s plan and what they can do now that they have the whole Book of Breathings. He watches her look at the mountain, waits for panic and immobilizing fear. (He has felt both of these innumerable times since she freed him from Amarantha. He will not force her into facing them.) There is a flicker of emotion along the bond and he hates that he can’t tell what that damned emotion is, but if she’s panicking or afraid or even nervous, she doesn’t let on.

The conversation with the Bone Carver goes very similarly as it might have in another world. When the Carver asks her about what the afterlife was like and she describes the golden thread tying her to life, she stops in the middle of her sentence and looks at Rhysand.

“And when I was Made anew. I followed that bond back—to me. I knew that-” And she breaks off suddenly and turns to look up a Rhysand. His face is still pale as death, the emotions swimming in his eyes unfathomable. This isn’t something she’s ever let herself think about in the years since she died Under the Mountain, in the months since she’s realized that he is her mate. It’s almost too much to bear, knowing that he was her mate and he watched her die and that she came back because he was on the other end of that strand of light in the darkness, that he was that strand of light in the darkness. There are no tears in her eyes as she holds his gaze and he doesn’t break her stare as she whispers, “I knew that home was on the other end of it.”

It takes all five centuries of learning how to restrain himself, his magic, his body, his mind, not to cross the space between them and gather her up into his arms. He doesn’t, but only barely. He doesn’t because they are in the Bone Carver’s cell and Bone Carver can’t know what she means to him. He doesn’t because he doesn’t understand her and he doesn’t know what to make of the way she’s swallowing and pressing her lips together. He doesn’t because this is the first time she’s acknowledged the bond between them since she left Tamlin and he thinks she doesn’t want him.

The Bone Carver still shares his ideas on how the Book can be used to create and destroy and manage the Cauldron. He trades the details of Feyre’s death for information on how the Cauldron can be nullified without destroying the world, on how the Cauldron is likely recovering its strength from Making the human queens immortal.

Once they know how to use the Book, the rest of their plans come together easily.

* * *

The first time Rhys has to fly Feyre, there isn’t an argument. She looks at him, standing the edges of the roof with his arms outstretched and she just shakes her head and winnows to the base of the steps leading to the House of Wind without saying a word. She’s on step two hundred and something when he finds her, swooping down towards her like a bird of prey, and plucks her from the ground and into his arms without any warning.

She screams and kicks and thrashes and her magic flings out in all directions and the combination nearly knocks him into the side of the mountain before she realizes it’s him and calms down. It’s more of reaction than he’s ever been able to extract from her and he cackles, actually cackles, with delight as he flies in loops and free falls while she shrieks. Eventually she settles enough to stop shouting threats at him, but her grip on him is so tight that he doesn’t even have to hold onto her as he flies. Not that it occurs to him that he could let go of her. He flies them higher and higher above Velaris until they are so far up that she can hardly tell the difference between the stars above her and the city lights below her.  

* * *

Rhys takes Feyre to the front lines as soon as Amren says she’s ready. She is still the only one who can use the Book of Breathings and the Book is the only thing that can keep the Cauldron at bay. They know the Cauldron’s being used on the northern sea border, so he takes her to a camp near there, hoping that she’ll be close enough to use it without getting into harm’s way.

His plan is to distract Hybern’s armies with a full scale attack while Feyre tries to disable the Cauldron from a remote location.

He figured that Hybern would anticipate their plan. He hoped that Feyre’s location would be remote enough that Hybern’s men wouldn’t be able to find her and left her in Cassian’s care just in case.

Feyre doesn’t stop fighting when the Attor wraps his hands around her neck. She has Amren’s training  and Mor’s instructions shouting in her head. It is her first fight, but she’s spent time in the minds of Tamlin’s most brutal soldiers and Hybern’s most hideous generals. She knows what to expect and she knows they have killed her escort and she knows that she will not stop until they are dead.

The Attor tries to fly away with her in his grip and instead of ash arrows poisoned with bloodbane, she uses her ice and her bare hands to rip him out of the sky. She still stabs him with a dagger she’s formed from ice, because the knife that was at her belt rests in the stomach of one of his companions on the ground. She uses that dagger of ice to freeze him from the inside out, the blood literally turning to ice in his veins and hoarfrost coats his lungs. When he hits the ground, his skin shatters on impact and his bones disintegrate and his silver blood covers the ground like snow.  

* * *

She threw herself against him, tears streaming down her cheeks and her arms wound around his neck and she buried her face in his chest. His arms close around her automatically, clutching her to him like he might be able to absorb her into his skin if he holds onto her tightly enough.

He used to dream of this. There had been a time when holding her in his arms was something he had never expected to be allowed to have. He loved her so much and she was in love with someone else and it killed him, but he had let himself imagine it anyway. Not often and never for long. It hurt too much to open his eyes and remember that she wasn’t his to love.

But even then he didn’t think that it would feel like this.

“I’ve got you,” he whispers into her hair. “I’ll never let them take you away from me.”


End file.
